Online Personals Watch: News on the Dating Industry and Business

New Cupid UK TV Advertising Campaign

BUSINESSWIRE - Nov 18 - Cupid plc has launched two TV advertising campaigns for its Cupid.com and BeNaughty.com brands across specific ITV regions. This is the first time Cupid has delivered its brand onto the small screen indicating the company's intention to push its brands out to a wider mainstream audience.

See full article at MarketWatch

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25% Of Singles Want To Join The Mile High Club

PR WEB - Feb 24 - More than 8,000 people took part in the online survey by BeNaughty.com and ~2,000 of them clicked ‘Doing it on a Plane’ as being one of their ultimate fantasies. What was also interesting about the results was that women were less concerned about the gender of anyone joining in with a couple’s bedroom activities. With 15.5% of women happy to have another man join in and 15.07% to have a woman share their fun. Only 3.82% would be happy to have another man join in and 31.25% said yes to a threesome with two women.

See full article at PR Web

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BeNaughty: Facts About Naughty Online Dating

MY NEWSDESK - Feb 1 - ~60% of UK singles would try an online dating service and of the UK’s 15M singles 20% would be interested in a casual fling. This explains the major boom in dating services such as benaughty.com. Now with ~3M members, BeNaughty connect like-minded individuals for sexy encounters. FULL ARTICLE @ MY NEWSDESK

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BeNaughty Top Mobile App In Android Download Charts

PR WEB - Nov 11 - A new mobile app from online dating service Easydate is #1 app in the Android download charts, according to Androidzoom. The recently launched mobile app version includes several new features, including a location based search feature which is a major hit. FULL ARTICLE @ PR WEB

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This week: news on Match.com, SNAP Interactive, EasyDate, Zoosk, AreYouInterested, GameCrush and Executive Dating.

Everyone Wants To ‘Be Naughty’

EASY DATE - Mar 31 - EasyDate has reached a major milestone with over one million active users of their BeNaughty Facebook app. Easydate is one of the UK’s leading online entertainment solutions providers. Founded in 2002, the company has expanded rapidly and in 2009 was listed in the Deloitte Fast 500 EMEA as one of the fastest growing companies in Europe, Middle East and Africa. Easydate now offers a network of niche, traditional and casual dating sites in the USA, Australia, Canada, South Africa and India and is also active in mobile dating and social media.

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This week: news on eHarmony, Match, PlentyofFish, eDarling, RSVP, BeNaughty, SeniorPeopleMeet, GameCrush and Back Row Dating

Online Cheating Is A Booming Business

SYDNEY MORNING HERALD - Mar 26 - 'LIFE is short. Have an affair!'' That is the line Noel Biderman uses to spruik his dating service, ashleymadison.com, which he claims has more than 5M philandering members, including 10,000 in Australia. An internet search throws up countless websites for cheating spouses, including meet2cheat.com.au, affairsclub.com, lonelyhousewives.com, philanderers.com and benaughty.com. ''I'm often asked if all these sites are causing more affairs,'' said the VP of Relationships Australia NSW, Anne Hollonds. ''To some extent it's easier, you can just sit at a computer. But these tend to be people who are wanting to escape their circumstances and derive the benefits from having a liaison with someone else. There have always been people who wanted to do that but they found other ways of doing it.'' FULL ARTICLE @ SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

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BeNaughty Reaches 3 Million Profiles

PRESS RELEASE - Mar 19 - An online UK dating site BeNaughty has grown to 3M member profiles over the past couple of years. The website is aimed at 18yr+ members looking for chat, flirting and more. FULL ARTICLE @ RELEASE-NEWS.COM

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This is the news for February 10th through February 15th, 2010. Please follow this link to enjoy the high-resolution version. Here is the news we covered:

• Visits to dating sites showing a general decline
• PlentyofFish vs. Match.com
• Mobile Dating and Virtual Goods are big business
• Online Dating is becoming commonplace
• Meetic has posted 2009 revenues
• Match.com and Meetic partner in Latin America
• Match.com joins forces with Neu.de
• New ad campaign for Match directly targets women
• Easydate and Dating Factory partner up
• IMVU teams up with Zoosk
• Avid Life Media and Friend Finder Networks shelve IPOs
• Matchmaking industry going strong

Watch Out For That Philandering Friend

REUTERS - Feb 16 - BeNaughty.com, a British dating site, has revealed  that half (46.9%) of the unfaithful men it polled for a survey on affairs admitted to having a fling with a friend's wife or girlfriend. "Attractions develop very easily between men and women who see each other often, in the same circles. And it is often easier to be together without arousing any suspicions", said Marketing Manager Sean Wood. FULL ARTICLE @ REUTERS UK

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Easydate Ltd And Dating Factory Partner

PR WEB - Feb 8 - Easydate owns one of the top ten UK dating brands BeNaughty.com, and with this partnership can now address the German, French Spanish and Italian speaking markets using Dating Factory’s white label dating platform. Datingfactory.com offers a multi lingual / multi cultural platform to open the door into Europe for major dating brands and general webmasters without them having to invest in multilingual staff, infrastructure and ongoing maintenance. FULL ARTICLE @ PR WEB

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Thrifty Singles Embrace Online Dating

FORBES -- Feb 13 -- Last month, traffic on Match.com's U.K. site grew 17%, from last year. EasyDate.biz, the parent company of online dating websites BeNaughty.com and DateTheUK.com, posted a 112% increase in sales this month from February last year. "We are currently experiencing massive growth in sales and membership levels are exceeding our projections. Month-on-month we are seeing an overall growth of 20%," said Easydate.biz Chief Executive Max Polyakov. FULL ARTICLE @ FORBES

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Love Not That Likely On Valentine's Day

PRESS RELEASE -- Feb 13 -- BeNaughty.com has identified which days of the year put the most strain on a relationship and found Valentine's Day caused grief for one in ten couples. New Year's Day was top (53%) with Christmas (21%) and Birthdays (16%) second and third in the survey, conducted among 1000 18-55 year olds for BeNaughty.com. The most cited reason for breaking up was simply falling out of love, pressure of work, becoming bored of sex with their partner, they met someone else and financial pressures.

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Recession Boosts Online Dating

TELEGRAPH.CO.UK -- Jan 5 -- Match.com reported pre-tax profit of £3.67m in the year to 12/31/07, compared with a loss of £2.19m a year before. Last year, total revenue for Match worldwide rose 12% to $348.7m (£240m) and operating income rose 13% to $65.8m. The international growth was driven by the UK and Scandinavia. British dating sites in general are seeing a rise in members despite the credit crunch. Nielsen Online indicate a 15% rise in unique users visiting online dating sites in Nov compared with the same month last year. Match and EasyDate, which owns the SpeedDater, DatetheUK and BeNaughty brands, say they have seen some of their best days of trading since the collapse of Lehman Brothers ramped up global financial turmoil in September. Ross Williams, founder and chairman of WhiteLabelDating.com, says its database of members has grown by 250% to over 1m in the UK, and overall annualised revenues have increased by 450% to over £12m in the past 12 months as the dating sector booms in the economic gloom. Mark Brooks, an internet dating analyst, says: "The entire industry, with the exception of more marginal traditional matchmakers, is doing better despite the downturn." FULL ARTICLE @ TELEGRAPH.CO.UK

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Lonely Log On To Find Love In A Cold Climate

THE INDEPENDENT -- Dec 14 -- Membership is booming at internet dating sites as the credit crunch and impending recession bring a rush to find a partner to share the pain. Companies such as Match.com and EasyDate, which owns the SpeedDater, DatetheUK and BeNaughty brands, say they have seen some of their best days trading ever. Match says it has experienced its 10 biggest days in terms of visitors in the past year, and three of those have been in the past few months. EasyDate says its sites have seen growth 10% above average since the beginning of September. DatingDirect hit 5m registered users five weeks ago. Nielsen Online indicate an 18% rise in unique users visiting internet dating sites between September and October, although that follows a 14% decline in the previous month. According to Jupiter Research, the industry will grow from 2.8m paid users in Europe in 2006 to about 6m by 2011. Over that period, revenues from British dating sites, will increase from €85m last year to €147.3m. Industry expert Mark Brooks says only four or five internet dating sites worldwide make serious money and that the growth in online dating is likely to slow in the UK next year as the market begins to reach maturity. FULL ARTICLE @ THE INDEPENDENT

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Discuss this at the iDate Forums

Santa Is A Secret Fantasy For 20% Of Women

PR NEWSWIRE -- Dec 9 -- 1 in 10 wear Santa costume in bedroom says BeNaughty.com survey. The BeNaughty.com research also revealed that 6% men had, at one time or another, dressed up as Santa Claus in the bedroom. FULL ARTICLE @ MARKET WATCH

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The Web Of Desire Or Just Deceit?

THE OBSERVER -- Oct 26 -- The web has become a place through which to contact, meet and have sex with real people. Some sites are quite explicit about their offerings. AdultFriendFinder claims to be the world's biggest adult social network and sex personals site. The site claims to have more than 2.5m members registered in the UK. Other sites quite evidently do as they promise, such as Hookuparea.com and BeNaughty.com. And when a marriage is under strain, spouses no longer have to go very far out of their way to cheat. Illicit Encounters asks on its homepage: 'Married but Feeling neglected? Illicit Encounters launched in October 2003 and now has 245,000 members, mostly in the UK. 65% of them are male. The site provides a guide on how to conduct an illicit affair, with advice tips including using a separate SIM card in their mobile phone, paying with cash instead of credit cards and never giving their surname, exact location or workplace. FULL ARTICLE @ GUARDIAN.CO.UK 

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Max Polyakov & Bill Dobbie, EasyDate - Interview

OPW INTERVIEW -- Sep 14 -- EasyDate powers some of the top dating brands in the UK. BeNaughty.com and Datetheuk.com. I talked with their Founder, and their COO, Bill Dobbie and Max Polyakov.- Mark Brooks

What’s your personal background?
Max: I finished Medical University in the Ukraine and, in 2000, started a web development outsourcing company. In 2004 I relocated to the UK and started HitDynamics, a WebAnalytics package which is now part of Hitwise, with one of my clients. At the same time we started an online dating business. We realized very quickly that you cannot do a dating business unless you have a database. So through Bill and his network we found a company in London which had been in the internet dating business for years. On top of their database we built what’s now known as EasyDate. We continued to work together with Bill on the other few projects under the IDE group, and the website content optimization company, Maxymiser.

Bill: After graduating from university with a degree in mathematics I moved on to sales and marketing with Unisys computer company. In 1989 I started Teledata which I sold to Scottish Telecom in 1996. Then after an earn out period there I started Iomart (AIM : IOM) and at the same time I created a joint venture with AboveNet which was sold to Metromedia Fibre Networks (MFNX). After I left Iomart and AboveNet I started several other businesses in the UK which include EasyDate and IDE Group.

Can you tell me more about some of your sites? What are the top EasyDate sites at the stage?
Max: DateTheUk is a traditional dating site which is growing quite successfully. On top of that we have SpeedDater which is now a fast growing component. Be Naughty is the other side of our business which is now bigger than FriendFinder in the UK. These three brands I think are recognizable in UK right now and have over 200,000 registrations a month just from the UK.

How are the sites differentiated from other sites in the UK?
Max: The lifetime value of the customer on sites like Match.com is around 2-3 months. People get tired of the interfaces and the site and cancel their membership. We have several white labels sites and can change design and integrate different functionality quickly, thus making more of our acquired customers by cross advertising between sites.

Bill: It’s important that we’re beginning to differentiate by niche and customer preferences, and by functionality. We will soon be integrating speed dating and mobile services in a way that hasn’t been seen before. You’ll see very shortly what we’ll be doing with events and, before Christmas, what we will be doing with mobile dating.

You’re large and you’re not really competing with the likes of WorldDatingPartners and WhiteLabelDating. You have your internal brands you’re rolling out and you are looking for external market, is that right?
Bill: Yeah but we debate whether we should try White Label Dating. But only because people come to us and have asked us to do White Label dating.

Max: Yeah. We have the engine ready for that but realistically, external white labels are not really protected. We believe internal white labels are much stronger because we’re effectively monetizing the brands and the brands belong to us. FriendFinder did it successfully. They built it on the basis of different niche websites.

One major strategic concern we have on white labeling is that your revenue and margin is dependent on a third party who has no real interest in your business and could leave you tomorrow, on the flip side it is probably a good short term cash geneartor as publishers and entrepreneurs are attracted to the dating business.

What are you plans and goals for Easy Date through the end of 2009? What will EasyDate look like by the end of 2009?
Max: We are going to replicate what we’ve done in the UK in other countries. Potentially, if we have enough resources and human power, we definitely can start in Brazil and India. We’ve already started successfully in the USA, Canada and Ireland.

Bill: That’s very much a secondary priority. The main priority is to improve our financial stand by doubling our profit in the next 18 months.

Max: For the 3 years, we have been doing this business, our profit has tripled and our revenue has grown 2 to 2.5 times every year. This will be our year number 4 and I don’t know why we couldn’t do it this year as well.

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Brokers Come Out On Top In Sex Survey

CITY.AM -- Sep 2 -- Brokers have been voted the "best in bed", according to a poll by dating site BeNaughty.com, which describes itself as a "flirty and addictive community of seriously sexy and naughty singles". Female lawyers came in a close second behind brokers while male analysts lagged behind, letting themselves down with poor foreplay. FULL ARTICLE @ CITY.AM

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